


Recontextualizing

by hauntedjaeger (saellys)



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: AU, Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, The Drift (Pacific Rim)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-15
Updated: 2013-10-15
Packaged: 2017-12-29 07:57:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1002903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/hauntedjaeger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You are your father’s son,” Stacker Pentecost said, “so we’ll Drift just fine.”</p>
<p>Chuck Hansen wondered if he had any idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Recontextualizing

**Author's Note:**

> Literally every idea in here, right down to the title, came from quigonejinn, which is probably why this is so twisted and awful and sad.

It didn’t happen in the first Drift. Oh, they chased plenty of RABITs, all over Sydney and the front and back of a Bell Kiowa, and Chuck saw parts of his mum he could have done without. (How Herc had loved the stretch marks on her body, the smile lines on her face. Traced them with his fingers. Made him itch to think of it.) Despite being out of phase for nearly ten minutes straight, the simulator results only confirmed what the preliminary brain scans and the match in the Kwoon had suggested: he and his old man were as Drift compatible as two people could be. 

It didn’t happen in the second Drift, spooling up Striker Eureka for the first time. The power around them, the fact that this machine was built for them, was waiting for them to bring it to life, summoned only the best memories where those same threads of feeling were woven. Lucky Seven’s first kill and the honest-to-God parade afterward. The girl Chuck had gone to see a couple movies with in Sydney, daughter of a Shatterdome tech, and the kiss she’d given him before he left for the academy, the only time they’d done anything other than hold hands. And another thing he could have done without: watching his own birth. 

It happened in the third Drift. Ho Chi Minh, 2020. Crimson Typhoon held onto the ugly bastard with all three arms, and it screamed when Cherno Alpha moved in to clobber it. Then the Russians stepped out of the way, and Chuck and his old man clenched their fists and threw their shoulders back to arm the AKMs. And somehow, that motion took Hercules Hansen back to the Jaeger academy.

* * *

Five years ago, Kodiak Island. Once Brawler Yukon was unveiled, everyone who had ever played a video game showed up at Doctor Lightcap’s door. No one got turned away. Arrangements were made for families. (An off-base apartment, school and an after-school program, a PPDC jeep picking him up when training ran late, which was often. Chuck never went a week without a fistfight, usually with kids twice his size.) By the second cut, most--but by no means all--of the cadet pairs were pilots who had flown combat together.

It was all the PPDC could do to keep the media out, prevent the academy from becoming a shitty reality TV show. The world saw some hope and clung to it, and gifts started appearing at the academy from all over. When it came out that Hercules and Scott Hansen had made the second cut, Australia said _Have a round on us_. 

Which is all to say that the beer Scott brought to Herc, up on the roof under the Alaska sky that was purpling like a bruise, was not the ration beer that came later when things started going to shit. It wasn’t even a lager. It was Sheaf Stout, and the first swig was as strong and bitter as Herc wished he felt. 

They drank slowly, looking out at the snow and the little patch of evergreens in the distance, not at each other.

* * *

“Striker, take the shot,” Sasha Kaidanovsky said.

One of the Wei-Tang triplets said they couldn’t hold on much longer. 

“Chuck is out of alignment,” said LOCCENT.

“It’s my fault,” Herc whispered.

* * *

Chuck chased one RABIT inside another--couldn't help it, that's why they're called Random Access--as Herc thought about his and Scott’s first Drift in the simulator that day. They hadn't even finished calibration. Chuck’s hands were Herc’s hands on Angela’s body, but when he reached up, he touched her lips, and they weren’t Herc’s hands at all, and the calendar on the kitchen wall behind her said March 2011, and Herc was in Afghanistan until June.

* * *

Chuck’s memory, now, around the same time: Mum was at the office late, so Scott picked him up from school and they stopped at Coles for some fish to grill out that night, and out in the parking lot he held his uncle’s hand and Scott pointed at the sky and said, “What kind of jet is that, Chuck?” It was a Hawk 127, which Chuck knew because his uncle had taught him the silhouettes of everything that flew out of Richmond, and he said so, and Scott mussed his hair.

* * *

Swearing over the comm. Cherno Alpha stepped back up, put the kaiju in a headlock, and snapped its neck.

* * *

Herc finished the beer and Scott twisted the caps off two more. “So now you know,” he said softly, “how hard I searched for her.”

Herc took the bottle, nodded. “Yeah.”

* * *

The back of a Bell Kiowa the front of a Bell Kiowa the front of a different Bell Kiowa and he tried the house first, but he couldn’t see the car, and Scissure had been engaged outside of town that morning and the government strongly suggested carrying on as usual because everyone knew that if the economy tanked, the kaiju won. So he flew downtown in the middle of evacuation, panic in the streets, a giant fucking monster somewhere beyond the skyscrapers, and he found her office building but it wasn’t like he could land, he’d be swarmed. And he circled as low as he dared, looking for her car in the traffic jam, but she was smarter than that, she’d be on foot because she could get farther, and he spiraled out and circled until they lured the kaiju downtown, and even then he made one more pass, saw her office building collapse, but no way was she still inside it, and he hauled ass west, cursing himself for the most useless fuck ever born and hearing his brother’s voice and his own as they stood on the tarmac that day.

_I can’t ask you to do that._

_You won’t have time to get them both. I’ll find her._

_Swear it._

_I’ll find her. Go and get your boy._

* * *

By the end of the second beer, Herc had nearly finished sorting the world back into order with this new information. He didn’t dwell on how long it had been going on. A long time. He didn’t bother asking about Chuck--neither one of them could be sure, and he wasn’t about to order a test.

He picked up the empties and went back inside. They never spoke of it again.

* * *

After tethering up to the Jumphawks and flying back to the Dome, after tuning out in the debriefing and avoiding the other Rangers’ eyes, after a long time under a scalding shower, Chuck picked up his tablet to start a movie so he could fall asleep, saw his reflection in the screen, and froze.

The broadness of his cheeks and nose. He forced a smile, prodded his dimples. Where had those come from? 

"Chuck?" Herc called from outside the door. "If you want to talk..."

What was there to say?

_It’s my fault_ , Herc had whispered, not about the RABIT but because of the RABIT, because he felt it again, the defeat. He had no right to expect anything else. It was the choice he made when he enlisted--gone for months at a time, back for a few weeks, no idea how to speak to his kid, who was growing up behind his back. Twelve years of that. Angela deserved something nice in twelve years. She deserved to not be lonely. She deserved to be taken care of. She deserved--

“Fuck this,” Chuck sighed, tossed the tablet back onto the desk, shut off the light, and closed his eyes.

* * *

Herc’s memory, one Chuck Drifted right past because he’d been there too, but it came to him from the other side as he was half-asleep: he asked and asked and finally Herc told him how Scott had earned the PPDC’s first ever dishonorable discharge.

Chuck watched his own face twist up in disgust. “Good riddance.” 

The memory of Herc’s relief flooded his nerves.

* * *

They dealt with grief in different ways. Herc lived like a monk. Scott didn’t. 

Herc’s memory: some shitty bar, the week before Manila. He couldn’t even recall where they were. “Come on,” Scott said, his back to the three Jaeger flies who were pretending not to see them. “Which one would you pick?”

“We’re just here to drink,” Herc said, and did. 

“ _You’re_ just here to drink. I could go chat up all of them, but I thought I’d do you a courtesy.” 

Herc glanced over his shoulder and they looked away. If he had to choose… “The one with the necklace,” Herc muttered.

That made Scott grumble, but he said, “Fine,” and got up, and the next time Herc looked over he was focusing his attention on the other two. Herc ordered another beer and never moved from the bar.

After the next week, after his last Drift with his brother, Herc spent a lot of time thinking about that night and others like it, trying to connect names and faces and places, but five years is a long time and he wasn’t paying attention. He didn’t know the girl from the Drift. He hadn’t done what he’d seen in the Drift. Those weren’t his hands.

Another memory: knocking on Scott’s door on the way to the canteen, glimpsing a slender bare leg on the bed as Scott opened it. “Long night,” his brother said. “Catch you on the Kwoon?” And Herc said yeah, and went to breakfast. 

Doesn’t matter how many times you Drift with someone--you’ll never see everything that’s in there. So the question Herc kept asking himself, the one that knotted up Chuck’s guts when he thought about it, was: had Scott ever been alone with Mako Mori?

* * *

“Who are you?” 

Chuck froze. Where the hell did he get off asking a question like that? Cheap shot, low fucking blow. Real classy, old man. 

Even if either of them could answer, what did it matter? The last days of war; he was nothing but a function. So. “I’m the guy who’s gonna deliver this bomb.” 

And maybe that wasn't the point, but Chuck couldn’t think of anything more important, because if he managed that, maybe he wouldn’t have to fall asleep asking himself that same question ever again.

* * *

A memory, Herc’s part: Angela’s voice on the phone. “Where are you this week?” 

“Can’t pronounce it,” Herc told her. “Plenty of rocks, though.”

A memory, Chuck’s part: Mum’s smile at that, the way she smiled every time he said it, which was every time he called. “Scott’s over, fixing the sink,” she said, and held out the phone. “Anything to report?” 

“Tell your son to stop sticking his toy cars down the drain,” Scott said from inside the cabinet.

On cue Chuck shouted, “Hi, Daddy!” Mum was laughing now.

She deserved to be happy.

* * *

“Stacker. That’s my son you’ve got there.”

Chuck turned, marveling that anyone could say anything that hit him harder than the Marshal’s little line about being an egotistical jerk. 

“My son.”

He looked at Hercules Hansen for the last time, and saw the resemblance.


End file.
